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Rudy Koshar
the links between automobility, roads, and German economic recovery in the
1930s; and the racist-political functions of the Autobahns. 7 An article on the East
German Trabant continues the trend for the historiography of the post-World War
II era, putting more emphasis on the the former German Democratic Republic
(GDR) regime’s political instrumentalization of the car than on its design or the
actual uses to which it was put. 8
My point of departure is that such research is incomplete at best – and misleading
at worst – without a greater understanding of the meanings (political,
cultural, social, and economic) of the automobile in everyday life. Wolfgang Sachs’
study of desire for the automobile, the exception that proves the rule to most
historiography on the German car, is a good starting point here. In an analysis that
is more evocative than analytical, he argues that many embraced the automobile
by the 1920s in Germany even though per capita automobile ownership there was
far behind what it was in the United States, Britain, or France. 9 Many Germans
began to assume that ownership of an automobile was possible in their lifetime,
that a new age of individual mobility was just around the corner, and above all,
that contemporary leisure culture would not deserve the name “modern” without
the presence of the motor car. Millions of Germans were already behind the wheel:
there were around 3.3 million vehicles in Germany in the summer of 1938, thanks
to two major spurts in car production in 1924–9 and 1933–8, both doubling the
number of automobiles. Car ownership was still very much an upper- and middleclass
phenomenon in German-speaking Europe, but between the world wars the
car had begun to make the turn from luxury item for the few to object of more
general use, including that of middle-class touring. The German auto industry
produced more than a quarter of a million cars in 1938 alone. The total number of
vehicles on the roads included cars, trucks and delivery vehicles, buses, and threewheeled
mini-cars (like the bravely named Goliath Pioneer) as well as over 1.5
million motorcycles. 10 The building of the Autobahn was expected to bring about
even more dramatic increases in the number of cars and trucks, drivers, and
tourists. The annual Berlin automobile show was not only an important event for
manufacturers, advertisers, and prospective buyers, but also for the general public
and tourists. Experiences of driving and representations of driving were already
integral elements of everyday culture – in film and literature, for example 11 – even
if the majority of Germans had still not driven a car or did not own one. For all
these reasons, the interwar era may be seen as a turning point in the history of the
culture of automobility even when the period of actual mass consumption of the
car would not come about until as late as the 1960s. 12
Roland Barthes once remarked famously that cars were like the Gothic cathedrals
of earlier ages, “the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by
unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population,
which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” 13 It may be added that like
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